New countries should rent land—not buy it

ave you ever seriously thought about starting a new country? Not a thought experiment, not a flag and a website, but the real thing: a functioning state. What problem would it solve? What would its value proposition be? Who would want to live there, and why would any existing government help bring it into existence? Those are the questions that serious business founders ask, and there is every reason to apply the same discipline to statecraft.

Very few people alive today have had any hand in the creation of a new country. It is the ultimate startup and, by most reckonings, the ultimate challenge. The international order currently comprises 193 UN member states, the overwhelming majority of which came into existence through war, colonial withdrawal, imperial disintegration, or some combustible combination of the three. New countries have tended to be accidents of violence rather than products of intention. The Startup States model coined in 2025 challenges that assumption directly: a new country can be founded on dry land, by deliberate design, in full conformity with existing international law, without displacement of populations, without secession, and without any of the coercive machinery that has historically attended state formation.

The legal architecture to do this already exists. It has simply not been used in this way before.

The place to begin is with why the other routes do not get you all the way there, and why, given that you will have to negotiate with a government in any case, you should train for the gold medal rather than settle for something considerably less valuable.

There is a negotiating logic that runs through the entire Startup States approach. If you are going to invest the time, legal work, diplomatic effort, and relationship capital required to sit across a table from a sovereign government and make an ask, you may as well ask for the right thing. Think of it like the Olympics. Nobody trains for a bronze medal. Serious athletes train for gold, prepare for gold, and design every aspect of their preparation around winning it. An athlete who privately decides that silver is the more realistic target is not being pragmatic; they are negotiating against themselves before the competition has begun. The same principle applies here. Do not sell yourself short, go for the gold and go for starting your own country!